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It's not really freedom of choice when facing a boys club trying to move into a profession. Looking at the big picture it becomes a quality of living issue...average teachers salary is what 50K, and they cap out around 60K. A programmer can start off at that salary right out school, and make over $100,000 quite easily depending on location and skill set. Someone else talked about nurses, and how do you compare $12 to $14 per hours to what a good programmer can make.
Now I'm not saying that I'm a programmer because of the money, but I like taking good care of my children, and work from home. As a programmer and a mom and a wife, I took the steps necessary many years ago to put my math degree to good use and become a programmer.  But even as a math major I faced many professors that didn't give women A's in both Pascal and Math, and what's worse they told us this the first day of class. Albeit this was in the early 90's.
With all of this said, I encourage ALL of my children (2 boys and 1 girl) to know the ins and outs of computers and how to write at least basic scripts. Maybe one will follow in Mom's foot steps and become of programmer.
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A boys club in IT? I'd love to see the evidence for that. I've missed out on the meetings... My team is two women and three men.
Quality of life is purely personal. People sacrifice pay to have a job they enjoy more, which results in a better quality of life, right?
I don't know the numbers nation wide, but in CA, average teacher salary is $60K and caps out around $88K. Average nurse salary is $72K. Average starting pay for a software engineer just out of college is $66K. Network admin / PC support personnel make less. Teachers and nurses are in the top 20% of all wage earners in the nation.
So, is it a girls club keeping men out of elementary school teaching and nursing jobs?
Men are even more dominate in the auto mechanics profession.
Gender disparity is not evidence of a problem.
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Ok boy's club has a much worse connotation than I intended...LOL Because the only time I have had issues was in college, and occasionally on forum boards.  And obviously I am only basing this on my experience...so it is very statistically inadequate, but in the last 20 years I have met possibly 5 women in the various facet's of IT that I have worked in. Everything from help desk to development.
So I often feel like the odd girl out. That left out feeling has a lot to do with why women don't go into IT. I love problem solving and I have always been very good with computers...I started programming on a commodore 64 and Qbasic.
So now that I have waffled on my stand, I will leave. I do wish that teachers and nurses made that much from Colorado to New York...they definitely deserve it.
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I don't think cloud computing will make any difference. I've worked in companies where I was the only female, and then others where it was equal. What I have noticed is more women whom are not from the US, seemed to be more interested in IT over American woman. In some cases, I know they found it was the best paying job in their country than other professions so more pursued it. We do so much outsourcing, its a good deal for them.
I've tried to convince my female friends that complain about not making enough to pursue a degree in IT and they look at me like I'm nuts. They take one programming class and get turned off to it. In that case, I wonder if is because working IT is not that glamorous, or only for "nerds". Most women don't want to be classified as being a nerd.
In either case, I have not found it to hinder me in finding jobs, and I don't have an issue with working with a majority of men. As long as an employer is not denying me a job because of my gender and my pay is equal, I don't care about the ratio of males to females. In some cases its been more enjoyable. Men don't generally have PMS.
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The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was built by Raytheon and used approximately 4000 discrete integrated circuits from Fairchild Semiconductor. Spanning nearly a decade of project development, the AGC began as a research project at the MIT Instrumentation Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The lab was home to the world's foremost experts in guidance and control, where Polaris and Poseidon missile guidance programs were developed. However, until Apollo, all computations for the equations of motion in these systems were performed by analog computers. In April 1961, NASA contracted with MIT to study the feasibility of a digital control system for the Apollo program.... The speed, power, and size requirements for the AGC drove an entire industry.
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The AGC would not have driven the electronic industry. Might have driven the industry for military systems. This is fringe stuff. Way too expensive. What drove the industry was building factories that could product stuff inexpensively, not hand build electronics. If you cannot manufacture it economically, the technology will only be used for niche applications.
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Clifford Nelson wrote: What drove the industry was building factories that could product stuff inexpensively, not hand build electronics.
I beg to differ. What drove the industry was figuring out the processes that would allow for factories to be built that could produce chips inexpensively. I'm not sure what the percent is nowadays for a new chip design on an assembly line for the first time, but IIRC (and I probably don't) Intel's rate of working chips was less than 1%. IIRC (again probably not) even on a tuned assembly line, the rate of working chips was around 5%. Anyways, the point is, the failure rates were (and probably still are) ridiculously high. To improve that rate, the industry struggles with the processes, and that drives other industries as well.
Marc
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I beleive that the failure rate depends on the complexity. For the most complex chips, especially memory, there will be much higher failure rates, but for simpler chips, it is significantly lower.
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No. More complex chip designs (particularly die shrinking) require more sophisticated fabrication techniques. Refining fab techniques is what reduces failure rates (and costs as yields increase).
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Even though more than 20 years have passed, I still remember wondering what it would be like to finish university and start working. Up until that point, I had pretty much spent my whole life in school, with only a few, non-programming summer jobs thrown in. My expectations of what it would be like to work as a software developer were mostly correct, but there were a few surprises in the first few years, and here are the top five. Wait, they actually expect the code to run?
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Better title: top 5 reasons why business programming sucks.
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Number 3 didn't surprise me in the slightest, I've never felt any non-trivial program was 100% complete even before I started working (including personal projects, which is why I tend to get discouraged and stop working on them).
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I bet another developer with only 10 years of experience would write this article differently. Anyone?
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5. People Interaction - I was not surprised because the software engineering courses I took in college prepared me for working in small teams, discussing / collaborating, on getting the group projects done that were assigned by our instructor. In the programming courses I often teach as a part time professor, I follow the same idea - small group projects to help teach these skills of working with others.
4. Writing Matters - Again thanks to my software engineering professor, this is not of surprise either. I require my students to document and write a little bit about the projects. What did they learn from it? What did they like about it? What did they hate about it? Also, if they were to do the project again, what aspects of it would they change?
3. Software is Never Done - This is of no surprise, and the only "surprise" to me is some projects that live out longer than their expected life expectancy in the SDLC.
2. Few Clever Algorithms - Really? I question this one as there are plenty of cleaver algorithms and solutions out there. Just takes a well motivated and driven mind to apply them.
1. Complexity from Aggregation - I disagree to an extent. "Complexity" is only how complex someone chooses to make something. Unless, this complexity is attempting to model something in science and nature 
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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All these kids want to do Game Programming. Knew a guy who did it, and it sucked. First of all there is no money in it since game programming is apparently contracted out, and the companies that do it are pressured on budget and time. Second, it is really the graphics designers that create the game now, not the programmers.
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There are a number of Java memes which annoy me, partly because they were always a bad idea, but mostly because people still keep picking them up years after there is better alternatives. Here are a few of them. My pet hates in Java coding. What are yours?
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Guess it is sort of like UNIX whose command line interface was extremely inconsistant. A real pain.
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The internet is ablaze with an out of control REST flame war. It seems that many people think there’s a REST protocol when in fact there’s no such thing. Looking for a protocol in Roy Fielding’s dissertation will get you nowhere because it’s an academic paper describing an architectural style, there’s no protocol to be had. The only contribution Mr Fielding makes to the debate is to tell almost anyone who describes their API as RESTful, that it is not. Writing RESTful web services, in practice – in the real world – means that you are on your own.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Writing RESTful web services, in practice – in the real world – means that you are on your own
The real world is also complicated. CORBA[^] and DCE[^] may seem complicated, but if all you want is something similar to a RESTFul web service, they are pretty easy to use.
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It’s been over a decade since Roy Fielding wrote his seminal dissertation on Representation State Transfer (REST). Over this period we’ve seen SOAP/WSDL fall out of favor as the cool kids transition their services over to the REST paradigm. Or so it seems on the surface. In reality, we’ve spent the last 10 years building various ad-hoc services over HTTP that borrow bits and pieces from the grand vision that Roy outlined. We’ve settled into a rhythm that, depending on your outlook, is either a naive implementation or an enlightened massaging of the initial approach. Is the glass half empty, or half full? Virtually no popular APIs that claim to be RESTful today actually honor the complete tenets of the faith.
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Once upon a time, Steve Ballmer blasted Apple for asking its customers to pay $500 for an Apple logo. This was the “Apple Tax“, the price difference between the solid, professional workmanship of a laptop running on Windows, and Apple’s needlessly elegant MacBooks. Following last week’s verdict against Samsung, the kommentariat have raised the specter of an egregious new Apple Tax, one that Apple will levy on other smartphone makers who will have no choice but to pass the burden on to you. Have we already forgotten the Microsoft Tax many Android handsets already pay?
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A lot of people are on the fence when it comes to Microsoft’s forthcoming OS. The Modern (formerly Metro) UI has made some previously enthusiastic Windows devotees reluctant to upgrade and, to be fair, it’s easy to understand why. But there’s much more to Windows 8 than just its touch-friendly but slightly clunky Start screen. If you’ve yet to make up your mind about upgrading, maybe some of these new features will sway you. I wonder if the app marketplace will take off. Could it be the next App Store?
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There are come compelling reasons in the article. Don't think it is enough for me to rush and replace my Windows 7 with Windows 8 though. We will see if this is another Windows ME or not.
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Hmm, copying files seems to be a lot slower to me. Plus you get stupid security messages. That would be more like a reason not to upgrade
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Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk. 720k ought to be enough for anyone.
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